Hi, guys. I’m Anushka, and I am from Vernon Hills, IL. I am fully committed to Indiana University and plan on double majoring in Economics and Special Education. I plan to rush and am excited about tailgating. I enjoy working out and hanging with friends. School is definitely a priority; however, I love to go out with my friends. I am also always down for a chill night in. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to be roommates or friends.

Does this sound familiar? If you scroll through any Facebook group for a college, it is filled with uniform posts like this. Incoming freshmen basically set up dating profiles to find roommates and meet new people.

Dani Tsvilik (12) said that she found her roommate through Facebook.

“The process of finding a roommate was intimidating at first. I think I added around 100 people before finding my roommate, but I also liked how open-ended the experience was,” Tsvilik said.

When I first joined the facebook group I didn’t know what to expect but I knew that I was excited to meet so many new people from my school and also find a potential roommate. The process got very overwhelming because there were so many people I wasn’t sure who I should reach out to or what to say.

What made the process even harder was that I felt shy or scared to reach out to the girls in the group chat because I was afraid that I didn’t fit the aesthetic that was prominent in the group.

Anish Deva, who was a resident assistant for two years, said that one of the most common trends he saw was that people who paired up to room through Facebook, or other group chats got along better than those who chose to go random. He says he thinks this is because those people who have talked before have built some kind of consistent communication and a stronger relationship.

Even though Facebook makes it much easier to connect with many people from your school, I think there is a downside to seeing so many people attending your school because you are only seeing a select pool of people out of the other hundreds and thousands of other students that will be at the school.

As I saw post by post of people finding roommates, I felt pressured to find a roommate quickly. I felt that I couldn’t take my time to let the process run its course and, instead, I had to make fake conversations with girls as the desperation to find a roommate had gotten to me.

I realized that I should find someone with the same ambitions as me. Someone who likes to have fun but also has a clear view of what they want for their lives and values the worth of a good education.

“Some of the most important things about finding a roommate, according to my experience would be to reach out to people who you think you think you can get along with for a long time. And also someone who is dependable, because in college, you will be put in so many unfamiliar situations, you want someone who you know will be there for you and someone to ‘come home’ to,” Deva said.

I started to weed out the girls who I wasn’t able to have a strong conversation with. I became more comfortable with them telling them quirks about me and embarrassing moments with the girls I started to Facetime regularly with. However, I still felt uncomfortable talking to some of them about this so I knew I wouldn’t want to room with them.

At this point only one girl was left, we had been talking for around 3 weeks and conversations became so much more easy, relaxed and fun with her. We talked about our plans after IU and where we see ourselves in ten years; we both had very similar ambitions which is why I asked her if she wanted to room with me.

Ultimately I think that the method of using Facebook to find a roommate worked great for me. Even though I had some doubts, at the end it let me get in contact with so many people that I will definitely be reaching out to in college.